Art & Antiques Venice
All those who were in the artistic trades had to deal with paintings, sculptures, precious reliquaries, valued marbles, books, fabrics and more. This period, the beginning of the nineteenth century, saw the birth of the professional antique dealer as we know it. In fact, even if among those who took by storm the civil and the religious goods, there were gloomy speculators, yet there were antique dealer whose name became popular and made the history of the artistic trade in Venice. In the 1940's there was a French antique dealer, a certain Sivry, who worked in a palace in S.Beneto. On the Grand Canal there is Palazzo Tron where Antonio Zen worked as "fine arts pieces and antique dealer". At the Madonna dell'Orto there was "the house of Luigi Roncan, which was furnished with paintings of the Venetian school and other schools". In the School of S.Teodoro the antique Sanquirico developed his busines and he was considered was one of the most capable of his time.In the second half of the century an other antique dealer: Barbini, who owned Palazzo Manin on the Grand Canal, and Consiglio Ricchetti, who kept his antiques in the mansion previously owned by Benedetto Marcello. Among the others: Favenza, Guggenheim and Genovesi are worth mentioning. Between 1860 and the end of the century, in Venice there were about twenty dealers in fine arts and antiques, about twenty second-hand dealers as well as some dealers in old laces.In 1874 Via XXII Marzo was opened in order to widen the art of the town and linked Campo S.Moisè with Campo S.Maria del Giglio. In the twentieth century many famous antique dealer had their address in this street but actually all the town was full of shops, warehouses and "antiques studies": from S.Polo to S.Marcuola, from S.Girolamo to S.Aponal, from Ruga Giuffa to S.Marina and to the Frari. Yet most antiques shops were in the district of S.Marco, as Calle dei Fuseri, S.Moisè, the Frezzeria, Calle dei Fabbri and Piazza S.Marco.In the 1950's and 1960's there were also antiques dealers of Venetian origin, but they chiefly worked in Milan and in the U.S.A.. One of them, Dino Levi, worked in S.Angelo, near the Grand Canal; another one, Tullio Silva, was an expert of Venetian furnishings of the eighteenth century.Today as well as in the old days, you can find shops of antique dealers anywhere in the town even if the most part of them are in the district of S.Marco.
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